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Bike of Theseus
Jan. 19th, 2013 07:19 pmApparently there's a Yiddish word, farpotshket, meaning "broken because someone tried to fix it", or according to one translation, "totally ruined in the attempt to fix a minor error". Which is kind of what I have just done to my bicycle, though not quite. (Though, FWIW, it was the entirety of my experience with orthodontia and also antidepressants.)
My bicycle is second-hand and pretty old. I bought it from a septuagenarian out in Fife who's been spending his retirement fixing up and resurrecting old bikes like some sort of bicycle necromancer, and then selling them on quite cheaply -- so I'm pretty sure was clabbered together out of spare parts to begin with. Anyway, bits of it have needed replacing pretty regularly, and in this instance the stretched-out chain had become a real problem, not a 'minor' one, and in any case it has not ended up totally broken. Just, y'know, broken in ways it hadn't been when I started.
There's a bicycle charity in my city (on the other side of my city, up a giant hill from my house...) where you can pay a small hourly fee to use their workspace and tools to fix your own bike, with the help of knowledgeable volunteers who roam around giving instructions and tips. So I went there today to change out my chain and my rear brakes, and learned how to change a chain and all, which was nice. Except that every time I go there, someone points out some other aspect of my bike which is a bit fucked, and it all ends up being more expensive and time-consuming and farpotshket-ish than it maybe really needs to be. In this case, a chain that needed changing was changed (by me + volunteer), and a gear cable was tightened (by said volunteer, who noticed it and then pulled it through a thing that I couldn't see well enough to undo), and now I can't really use my top two gears because they keep skipping. I guess it's probably a result of the new chain, but I'm suspicious of the cable-tightening, mostly because I don't really understand what happened.
Also my back wheel is pretty much fcuked, which is annoying; I'd bought that wheel from the bike charity in the first place, and not all that long ago (about 16 months, maybe) -- although it was second-hand so I don't know if I can even complain. And I know I should replace the wheel and I guess I should replace the gear-sprocket-thingy (cassette? freewheel? people keep seeming to use different words for this thingy, with the result that I've no idea what to call it!), but apparently it's really hard to find ones with a lowest gear that's as big as mine is, and I really like having a nice low-low gear for climbing hills with my bad knees. Apparently they used to be made so that you could replace each sprocket individually, but now they're not, and so even if mine can be disassembled, I'd have a hard time finding new sprockets to just replace the two highest gears.
What I have done, then, is not precisely to break something in the process of trying to fix it, but to successfully fix something, and in the process also break something else about it: I have fuxed it. I see some people on UrbanDictionary have beaten me to this particular portmanteau, though their proposed definitions don't seem to be distinct at all from 'farpotshket'. Or maybe 'farpotshket' already includes this situation. Any Yiddish-speaking readers please do let me know.
My bicycle is second-hand and pretty old. I bought it from a septuagenarian out in Fife who's been spending his retirement fixing up and resurrecting old bikes like some sort of bicycle necromancer, and then selling them on quite cheaply -- so I'm pretty sure was clabbered together out of spare parts to begin with. Anyway, bits of it have needed replacing pretty regularly, and in this instance the stretched-out chain had become a real problem, not a 'minor' one, and in any case it has not ended up totally broken. Just, y'know, broken in ways it hadn't been when I started.
There's a bicycle charity in my city (on the other side of my city, up a giant hill from my house...) where you can pay a small hourly fee to use their workspace and tools to fix your own bike, with the help of knowledgeable volunteers who roam around giving instructions and tips. So I went there today to change out my chain and my rear brakes, and learned how to change a chain and all, which was nice. Except that every time I go there, someone points out some other aspect of my bike which is a bit fucked, and it all ends up being more expensive and time-consuming and farpotshket-ish than it maybe really needs to be. In this case, a chain that needed changing was changed (by me + volunteer), and a gear cable was tightened (by said volunteer, who noticed it and then pulled it through a thing that I couldn't see well enough to undo), and now I can't really use my top two gears because they keep skipping. I guess it's probably a result of the new chain, but I'm suspicious of the cable-tightening, mostly because I don't really understand what happened.
Also my back wheel is pretty much fcuked, which is annoying; I'd bought that wheel from the bike charity in the first place, and not all that long ago (about 16 months, maybe) -- although it was second-hand so I don't know if I can even complain. And I know I should replace the wheel and I guess I should replace the gear-sprocket-thingy (cassette? freewheel? people keep seeming to use different words for this thingy, with the result that I've no idea what to call it!), but apparently it's really hard to find ones with a lowest gear that's as big as mine is, and I really like having a nice low-low gear for climbing hills with my bad knees. Apparently they used to be made so that you could replace each sprocket individually, but now they're not, and so even if mine can be disassembled, I'd have a hard time finding new sprockets to just replace the two highest gears.
What I have done, then, is not precisely to break something in the process of trying to fix it, but to successfully fix something, and in the process also break something else about it: I have fuxed it. I see some people on UrbanDictionary have beaten me to this particular portmanteau, though their proposed definitions don't seem to be distinct at all from 'farpotshket'. Or maybe 'farpotshket' already includes this situation. Any Yiddish-speaking readers please do let me know.
